The “Irresponsible People Are Irresponsible” Argument

A while back I wrote an article wherein I criticized a fallacious kind of thinking that I see most often among accomodationists when speaking about the religious. However, there is a variant that tends to occur in liberal political and social thinking that I wanted to point out. In it’s most general form, it goes, “these people are going to be irresponsible, you can’t make them responsible, so you have to make allowances for their irresponsibility”.

No I don’t.

Like I said in the stupidity article, I think these people need to be punished for being irresponsible. I want it to hurt. That’s the only way they’re going to learn that irresponsibility, like ignorance or stupidity, is an unacceptable trait.

See, there was, at one time, a thing in this country called “shame”. It’s largely been forgotten about these days but it needs a serious resurgence. People who did stupid things were ashamed of themselves. They understood what was expected of them and they strove to meet those expectations the best they could. These could be simple expectations like keeping up your yard or a bit more difficult like keeping a job and paying your own way. There was a time when a neighborhood was a social support structure, you needed your neighbors to watch your back and help you out. You therefore worked to fit in on some level so you knew that when you really needed it, they’d be there for you.

Today though, that’s really not the case, most people have no idea who their neighbors are, never speak to them and really don’t care. They live in their own little fantasy world, in front of the boob tube and the computer monitor, and they have little interest in what goes on around them, so long as it doesn’t negatively impact their lives. However , they don’t really care if what they do negatively impacts the lives of those around them because hey, everyone is self-centered and entitlement-happy today, right? This has seriously ruined most neighborhoods, but it’s also helped to ruin this nation.

We’ve now raised at least two generations of people who were born or grew up after the “liberalization of America” that started in the late 1960s and continues through today. It taught, and continues to teach, that people are not responsible for themselves, that they shouldn’t have to ask for help, they shouldn’t have to earn their place in the community, that it’s owed to them by the government, just because they bothered to wake up in the morning. It’s the school of thought that says everyone gets a trophy, everyone deserves to feel equal, even if they’ve never earned it, in short, it’s the liberal idea that everyone inherently deserves the equality of outcome instead of the far more rational equality of opportunity. It teaches that nobody ever has to earn anything and nobody ever has to feel responsible to the group. It’s not rugged individualism, where people are totally responsible for themselves, it’s kind of a whiny individualism where the people who complain the loudest get the biggest government check.

And it has ruined this nation like nothing else I can think of.

It’s screwed up education. No longer are kids pushed to compete for the best grades, are those who work the hardest rewarded by the schools, now everyone gets a prize just for showing up and nobody is penalized for failure, or worse yet, for being disruptive, telling people to work harder or behave themselves just might hurt their feelings and we can’t have that!

It’s screwed up our finances. The number of people receiving some sort of government welfare check has grown dramatically in just the past decade alone. Total federal and state welfare spending rose from $431 billion in 2000 to $927 billion in 2011. In 2013, approximately 1 in 6 Americans receive food stamps and the government actively promotes this program for families whether they actually need it or not. While the blame for this can be placed on both major parties, the fact remains that since Obama took office, federal spending on welfare programs has increased more than 41%. In fact, if the current rate of spending remains constant, by 2018, it is estimated that the total welfare spending will be more than $10.3 trillion dollars. Add in all of the unfunded liabilities, economist Laurence Kotlikoff estimates that the total federal indebtedness at an astonishing $222 trillion and that number will only grow.

But it also screwed up society. It is clear that this “liberalization of America” has done much to discourage basic, central social mechanisms such as marriage, the work ethic, tight communities, etc. As much as we have a problem with material irresponsibility, we have an even larger problem with behavioral irresponsibility. There has been a ridiculous uptick in unwed mothers in just the last couple of decades alone. Between 1980 and present, it has increased by more than 80%, but just in the last 5 years, those numbers are up 20%. In 2011, the last year that specific numbers are available, more than 36% of all births in the United States were to unmarried mothers. This is alarming. People know I’m not advocating marriage for any religious reason, it’s a basic social mechanism that helps guarantee a healthy, stable 2-parent household in which children do best. It really doesn’t matter if it’s a straight household or a gay one, children do best, behave better, get better grades and have less incidence of criminal behavior if there are two active, involved parents in the family than if there is only 1. That’s reality and the existence of this kind of family structure is absolutely essential for the health of our nation. Look at how our culture has disintegrated as single-parenthood has increased and it will only worsen when the children, born to unwed mothers, who do not have a dual-parent household, grow up to do the same thing. We see this in minority communities where unwed mothers have children that become unwed mothers and absentee fathers. It is a deadly cycle that gets repeated over and over again.

But why is this the case? Because so many liberals, and I’m sorry, this is primarily a liberal issue, place the freedom and happiness of the individual ahead of the responsibility the individual has toward society as a whole. Of course, it’s no surprise that so much of this comes at the hands of the so-called “me generation”, baby boomers who were more interested in becoming “self-realized” and “self-fulfilled”, turning their attention inward instead of outward. They raised the first generation of these self-absorbed liberal asshats. Luckily, there are many, myself included, that did not fall into that trap, we got an education, we learned a work ethic, we applied ourselves and succeeded on our own efforts and have gotten ahead. Yet we look at the world around us and realize that we’re fighting an uphill battle with millions of welfare-addicted Americans strapped to our backs. We are paying the way for more than 52 million Americans who are just getting food stamps, imagine how many we’re carrying that are getting welfare too!

Something has to be done. We’ve raised several generations of people who think they deserve happiness, to think they deserve big screen TVs and new cars every other year and big houses, yet shouldn’t be held accountable for their bad decisions or lack of hard work. They think responsibility is a bad word and as they continue to suck down the limited resources this nation can provide, as they pump out even more irresponsible children who think they ought to get good grades because they sat in a desk, young people who think they either don’t need to work, or that jobs ought to be presented to them on a silver platter, adults that want all the latest and greatest electronic gizmos without caring if they can afford them or not, this country is going to tip over into a financial death spiral and we’re all going to go under.

I suspect that the self-absorbed liberals won’t care, but when there’s nobody left to give them their checks or pay for their food or clean up their messes, who are they going to cry to? Who will they scream at, teary-eyed, that the world isn’t fair? Hopefully nobody because those people just need to go away. We need to return to basic secular conservative values, things that have worked for decades when they were in place.

Too bad I don’t think that will ever happen. We’re headed for the cliff fast folks. When the liberal entitlement losers go over, I hope they don’t take all of us with them.